She could hear Loring two floors above, hear the staticky clicks of his finger on the call button.
The elevator hesitated between the up and down calls—and then with a thin screaming sound it began lumbering downward at a maddeningly unhurried speed.
Babe heard footsteps crashing down the stairs, doors slamming.
The elevator crawled to three, and she glimpsed Loring’s face as he peered through the elevator door and then dove into the stairwell. His workboots thunked down the concrete steps. The elevator dropped past three.
And suddenly he was there, swinging his hammer, shattering an opening in the elevator door. The sledgehammer crashed through the breach. The gate began buckling.
The elevator continued its downward crawl past two. The hammering suddenly stopped.
As the elevator reached the first floor, Loring darted into view. The sledgehammer struck two battering blows at the door.
Babe pressed her weight on the up button, trying desperately to reverse the elevator’s direction.
She searched frenziedly through her purse for some object of defense. She had nothing.
Babe dropped her purse.
Loring yanked the door open and slammed the grill aside.
His face was inhumanly twisted.
Babe held her shoes in front of her, toes out.
He lifted the sledgehammer, and twenty pounds of raw iron arced through space.
Babe ducked.
The hammer smashed into the wall behind her, ripping down bunting, then lifted again.
With the toes of both shoes angled directly at his eyes, Babe thrust.
As Cardozo and Cordelia entered the building there was a buzzing sound of voices. A small crowd stood in the hallway. At first they seemed to be the overflow of some party, chatting, and Cardozo half expected to see that they were holding glasses of wine.
But one of the men was holding up Babe Devens.
Her hair was tangled across her face and her evening dress was ripped. She stretched out a hand to Cardozo. The hand held a shoe, held it tightly, like a weapon. There was blood on the toe.
Cardozo opened his arms and she stepped in against him and he hugged her. Then Babe put both hands on Cordelia’s head and kissed her.
“What happened?” Cardozo said.
A professorial man in his late forties stepped forward. “I saw it.” He was gray-haired with a world-battered, intellectual sort of look, wearing an open-necked shirt and blazer. “A madman was going at her with a sledgehammer. If we hadn’t walked in when we did, he would have smashed her head open.”
“It was Loring.” Babe’s breathing steadied. “He was waiting upstairs.”
“Are you okay?” Cardozo asked.
“Okay now,” she said, but there was a look in her eyes and it was light-years away from okay.
Cardozo took Cordelia and Babe up in the elevator to the sixth floor. A hole had been hammered in the apartment door and splintered wood littered the hallway. He pushed the door open.
The structural columns in the apartment glowed in the light coming through the windows. He flicked the light switch. Half the furniture in the room had been shattered.
“My God,” Cordelia whispered, and put her hands to her face.
“He was waiting here to kill you, Cordelia,” Cardozo said. “You, not your mother. And you know who sent him.”
52
LUCINDA MACGILL, TALL AND slim, carried herself from the car to the doorway with a purposeful stride. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”
“Vince told me to find you.” Monteleone leaned his thumb on the buzzer. “That’s all I know.” His pale, heavy-jawed face stared impatiently between the bars of the wrought-iron grill.
A moment later Cardozo opened the town house door. He looked agitated. “Glad you’re both here. I appreciate it.”
He took MacGill and Monteleone upstairs to a room with cherry-wood paneling. Lucinda MacGill glanced at the French impressionists on the wall.
“Your surroundings have improved, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks. Have a seat.”
MacGill sat down in a silk upholstered bentwood chair and surveyed Cardozo with a steady eye.
“Let me just give you some idea what’s coming down,” Cardozo said. “I have two very nervous ladies in the next room. Tonight an attempt was made on the life of one of them, but it was meant for the other. You know the mother, Babe Devens. She’s the one who almost got taken out. I don’t think you know the daughter, Cordelia Koenig. Cordelia has been through a lot. A lot. She’s at the breaking point, and she’s ready to tell us just about everything we need to make an indictment. Is your tape recorder loaded, Counselor?”
Lucinda MacGill slid her Panasonic out of her purse. “With a ninety-minute tape.”
“We’re going to need every inch of it. Let’s go.” Cardozo showed the way to the room next door.
Cordelia was sitting on the deep plush sofa, not moving, tensed, her eyes fixed on the green marble fireplace with its brass griffin and irons. Babe was sitting in the chair beside her daughter, and she shifted nervously while Cardozo made introductions.
Lucinda MacGill adjusted herself in a comfortable chair. Her eyes took in the dark oak paneling, the oyster-colored silk curtains, the Boesendorfer concert grand piano. Bowls of cut roses and gardenias lightly scented the air.
“Anytime you’re ready, Cordelia,” Cardozo said.
Lucinda MacGill started her tape recorder.
Cordelia seemed to lose herself for a moment, blinking and gazing around the room as though she had gone to sleep somewhere else and just woken up in a place she’d never seen before. When she finally spoke, her words had a once-removed, hearsay quality, as if everything she was describing had happened way offstage to someone else.
“We started making love when I was eleven. I didn’t really know about sex and I didn’t know what we were doing and I didn’t know he was filming it. He gave me drugs. He said he loved me. He said we’d get married when I was sixteen.”
Her uninflected tone told of a life of anguish and solitude, a life so screwed up that there had never been any point not screwing it up further.
“He said Mother would be drunk that night and so would Scottie. All I’d have to do would be to go into the bedroom and put the needle into her arm and empty the syringe. My mother and stepfather came home drunk and they passed out. I went into their bedroom and I put the needle into my mother’s arm.”
Babe was sitting there, erect and slender against the back of her chair, looking at her daughter with eyes that were wide and pained.
“I only gave her half the dose,” Cordelia said.
“Just a minute,” Lucinda MacGill said. “You did what?”
“I gave her half.” Cordelia blinked hard and a confused frown made tiny lines in her face. “I don’t know why. I guess I couldn’t kill her all the way.”
Lucinda MacGill rose. “Miss Koenig, don’t say another word to me or to Lieutenant Cardozo or to Detective Monteleone or to any member of the police force or district attorney’s office.”
Cardozo’s head snapped back into a disbelieving stare. “What the hell are you pulling?”
“Lieutenant,” Lucinda MacGill said, “we need to have a word.”
He followed her into the hallway.
“It’s tainted.” Lucinda MacGill spoke with flat finality, sliding the glass-paneled door shut behind them. “Nothing that girl says is admissible.”
“You got to be crazy.”
“Cordelia is confessing to the attempted murder of her mother. Her evidence is self-incriminating. She should be represented by counsel when she talks to the police.” Lucinda MacGill’s manner was precise, unexcited, unemotional. The perfect justice machine. “No counsel on earth would permit her to make those statements.”
“She chooses to waive her goddamn rights.”
Lucinda MacGill’s eyes said Vince Cardozo was an idiot. “You can read her her Miranda twelve times and she can waive her rights thirteen times, she’s still got to have a lawyer because otherwise this is not going to be allowed as evidence in any court of law.”